Seeing red

[bennyboy]

If you tell me that materialism is an insufficient explanation for how a watch works, let alone how the universe works....and you tell me that idealism includes it, absorbs it.....You have included and absorbed that which you have declared to be insufficient.

First of all, don't be offended. Subsuuuuuumes is just me playing around with emphasis, because it's central to my view, not just a semantic argument.

Idealism subsumes the mechanical and scientific understanding-- those are all ideas, after all. There's no problem with having many ideas being about things or properties, and in fact those kinds of ideas are very useful.

I think what it is with science is actually that there's a kind of secondary dualism: if science describes something, then science is a kind of proxy subjective agent-- it's active in the sense that it describes something. And it doesn't make sense to think of a subjective perspective without an object for it to perceive-- so the objective world must exist as science perceives it.

We talked in the past (or at least I did and you posted reponses to my posts) about the idea of scope-- that is, that ideas are relevant, or can even be taken at face value, in a given scope. So if I want to know how to build a bridge that stands up, I'll look up some books on architecture, check the tensile and compressive strength of materials in charts, etc. I don't need to ponder the philosophical implications of bridge building, because I just need to have the experience of a bridge that doesn't fall down, i.e. the physicalist explanation is perfectly sufficient in this scope. It's only when I say, "I can build a bridge, and it stands up, and I can do lots of other neat stuff, so nothing exists but things and their properties" that I am transcending the scope in which ideas about bridge building are validly applied. Or when I say, "Science has solved more problems than anything else, so it's the best tool with which to establish the meaning of beauty, or of what constitutes right and wrong."

The thing about subsumption is it creates nested sets. So a physicalist, scientific view is reserved for ideas about things and their properties, and another set of ideas may be applied to issues of right and wrong, and it isn't necessary that the twain shall ever meet.